Times 25,914: The Moaning After

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Well, this morning proved a struggle. It was my birthday yesterday and I’m afraid to say that seven drinks at two separate London hostelries last night may have been three or four too many. Bleary and hungover, I logged into the Times Crossword Club and was not displeased with a time of 15 minutes-ish… until I went to submit and realised I hadn’t logged in at all, and had been doing the sample cryptic instead.

Elder daughter dressed and taken to school, I plonked younger daughter in front of the TV and prayed for an easy puzzle at this late stage of Friday morning. No such luck! I found today’s really quite arduous, well over half an hour on the clock, with many tricksily concealed definitions and/or complicated routes to solutions. Matters were not helped by more than one false start: CAMP at 1D, MOLE at 28A (always bad when one’s FOI is an error!), something TOWN at 11D… I definitely blame the liquor.

LOI was 1D and I must confess I only managed to parse it as I was writing up the blog, I think under competition conditions I might have handed in a doomed and desperate “POSE”. It wasn’t easy to muster up a COD for a puzzle that I mostly experienced through gritted teeth (last night’s overindulgence’s fault, not the setter’s, I must stress!) but even with a pounding skull I did like “remand aged criminal” at 24A, rather neat.

Okay, no more booze for me until the 18th October I think! Though that could end up being a very boozy afternoon, sorrows to drown and all that…

Across
1 PICKPOCKET – a dip: PICKET [fence] “crossing” POCK [pitted area]
6 YEAH – agreed: E [energy] in HAY [fodder] “about”
9 SO THERE – sneer: OTHER [different] “at heart” of SE{e} [“see, brief”]
10 PUFFING – “apparently short of wind”: PUFFIN [seabird] + G [“heading for” gale]
12 SUPERVISOR – head, perhaps: V S [very small] “dipped separately” in SUPERIOR [lake]
13 RAW – “not yet ready to eat”: “peeled” {p}RAW{n} [crustacean]
15 OPTICS – “visionary study”: {c}OPTICS [Christians “not the first”]
16 ORDINARY – plain: OR DINAR [gold coin] + Y [unknown value]
18 OLD SARUM – Wiltshire ruin: (SOLD*) [“originally”] + ARUM [lily]
20 SIERRA – “Range abroad”: “sounding out” SEA AIR [ozone] + A [area]
23 RAY – “shaft”: Man, maybe, i.e. artist Man Ray
24 GRANDE DAME – formidable woman: (REMAND AGED*) [“criminal”]
26 BARISTA – employee in cafe: (STAB AIR*) [“furiously”]
27 AGITATE – try to move: IT [thing] “set in” AGATE [stone]
28 ESPY – spot: punnily, an “electronic eavesdropper” would be an e-spy
29 MIND READER – stage entertainer: MINER [one in the pit”] “inspiring” DREAD [terror]

Down
1 POSY – double def: bunch / tending to strike attitudes
2 CATSUIT – tight costume: (ACT*) [“new”] + SUIT [“diamonds perhaps”]
3 PREFER CHARGES – put in dock: and one “who doesn’t want any offers to be free” punnily prefers charges
4 CLEAVE – divide: C [a hundred] + LEAVE [have as remainder]
5 EXPOSURE – double def: revelation / possible cause of death
7 ERITREA – country: TIRE [weary] “over” + REA{d} [“endless” study]
8 HIGHWAYMAN – punnily, a criminal proceeding by stages, i.e. stagecoaches
11 FORTIFIED WINE – port: (IOW + DIFFERENT + I)* [“confused”]
14 HONOURABLE – decent: H [hot] + ON OUR {t}ABLE [“dinner for us here perhaps” “dropping” the T for temperature]
17 GUJARATI – Indian: I TAR A JUG [“I preserve a piece of crockery”] “knocked over”
19 DAY TRIP – “where none stay the night”: D [daughter] + I [one] “interrupting” (PARTY*) [“wild”]
21 RIMBAUD – poet: sounds like RAMBO [“a violent tough”]
22 ID CARD – authorisation: I’D CAR [I had vehicle] + D [rented “finally”]
25 LEAR – king: CLEAR [unblocked] – C [“having no clubs”]

87 comments on “Times 25,914: The Moaning After”

  1. One wrong for me, POSE as LOI. I don’t get bunch=POSY, as a bunch should, to me, be posies. Anyway, the rest was entertaining, and took around 30 minutes. Regards.
  2. I assume you mean consonant, in which case I’m not sure that’s what I’d call the sound that comes out of the throat of a Dutchman saying ‘Van Gogh’ !
    1. Yes I of course meant consonant. Americans pronounce FILLET fill=ay as if it was the French FILET. So they’re not above a french pronunciation even if it’s not really necessary!
        1. The “French” pronunciation of Beijing – with a soft “j”instead of a “dz” sound as in the Chinese – is so widespread that I actually notice when the odd hack says it right.
          1. I didn’t know that, but it would sound rather affected to me if I heard someone say ‘Beidzing’. Like an Englishman insisting on the ‘correct’ pronunciation of ‘Paris’.
            1. “Jing” as in “jug”, of course, in case of any confusion. Difficult to answer that, strictly rationally, especially when the Cantonese Ba(t)* Ging got scrambled into Peking, but we must all be allowed our bugbears! It goes without saying, that “Beigeing” sounds affected to my ears.

              * “unexploded” consonant

              1. Ah, I see what you mean. Either sounds fine to me: probably because beige is becoming the norm.
  3. RIMBAUD doesn’t sound in the least like RAMBO, at least to my ear, and YEAH – really? In the Times? Oh well….
    For some reason I wanted to put in PROFER charges which didn’t help at all. Favourite clue PICKPOCKET – didn’t click for ages as a definition for dip, so well done the setter.
    Finally finished in 70 minutes, rather unsatisfied!
  4. Yes John Buchanan I’m sure that prefer charges is in the dictionary. I haven’t looked it up but it means something like ‘choose to make a legal charge against someone’. And kevin_from_ny surely a posy is a bunch of flowers?
  5. 15:23 for me – still off the pace, though with tiredness as the (admittedly rather poor) excuse today.

    An interesting and enjoyable puzzle. I liked both 20ac (SIERRA) and 21dn (RIMBAUD) – both quite close enough as homonyms in crosswordland.

  6. Sorry, I forgot to ask: is there a dictionary that supports COPTICS (rather than just COPTS) = Christians?
    1. Not Collins, the OED or Chambers anyway, Tony, all of which have it as a noun only in the sense of the language of the Copts
  7. Well, I made it at last. Total solving time approximately 11 Severs, which is poor even for me. With sufficient dogged determination, there is almost no limit to the amount of time one can waste.

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